Published Reviews

This is a moving and profound novel, exploring the ways in which love counters cruelty in even the harshest of conditions. The characters are beautifully drawn, their feelings and motivations believable and real, their loves alternately heartbreaking and redemptive. Even the minor characters are drawn with the kind of careful detail that makes them spring brilliantly to life. The author deftly leads the reader through his characters’ minds, allowing us to understand their actions on a deep and sympathetic level, making it difficult to hate them outright even when they behave hatefully. Events move at a steady pace, neither rushed nor dragged out, and the plot unfolds gently before the reader, giving us a view of a better future through the dim haze of a damaging and poisonous past. The author’s descriptive powers are substantial, particularly where emotions are concerned, and the most passionate scenes, whether erotic, angry, despairing, or joyful, are all charged with a vivid intensity

I want you to read David Greene's novel Unmentionables, because it is a terrific, life-affirming read.

It should have a place in every reader's library, and the sooner you make time to read it the sooner you will share the great experience I've had the past few days.

I'm not going to pigeon-hole Unmentionables by saying "think Gone with the Wind meets Brokeback Mountain," because that wouldn't do justice to the novelist's achievement in recreating a historical world that seems to suggest the impossibilty that he might actually have been present for everything that happened out of Margaret Mitchell's earshot.

One important element of Greene's triumph here is strikingly reminiscent of the great tradition of English novelists from Eliot and Hardy to D.H. Lawrence. Part of what made the English novel of the 19th and early 20th century so compelling was the existence of class and social barriers that locked characters out from opportunities to live their dreams.

American culture has often tended to homogenize our experience and deny the existence of such barriers to focus on less compelling personal idiosyncracies, but the barriers are there, they have always been there, and in Unmentionables Greene gives resonance both to those barriers, to their human cost, and to the passion and nobility that such barriers can inspire in "ordinary people."

Any reader looking for a departure from the tradition of Gone with the Wind, will find this novel an excellent alternative. Unmentionables is superb historical fiction with a contemporary angle; an enlightening look at the hidden elements of our past.

...quite possibly, the best depiction of a dog’s point of view that I’ve ever read.

2010 Book of the Year Winner!

June 25, 2011: Unmentionables won the bronze medal in the Gay/Lesbian Fiction category at the ForeWord Review 2010 Book of the Year Awards at the American Library Association convention in New Orleans.

Reader Reviews

“Not only could I not tear myself away, I felt compelled to pull others along with me - reading favorite passages to friends over a latte or during late night phone calls.The author has served up a luscious, captivating, astonishing read and leaves us famished for more!”--Susan Snell, Amazon reader “This book is so good it should be on high school and university reading lists.An amazing civil war story told simply and very smoothly.Just read the book and let it flow into your soul."--Charles Lane, Amazon reader, Alaska